kissed the thousand-day stone still standing before the great rough-hewn
cross that the saint made, kissed the ikons, crossed ourselves before
many forest shrines, and eventually came to the far shrine where
Seraphim spent so many years in the wilderness. Here an aged monk,
taking the place of the _starets_, asked us our Christian names and
where we came from. He had a great sack of _sukaree_ similar to that
which Seraphim had dispensed, and he gave us each a handful with his
parting benediction. At the well, now made into an elaborate bath-house,
men one side and women the other, my pilgrim had a bath. It struck me as
rather interesting that the monks of Sarof had fitted a dozen or so taps
to Seraphim’s natural spring and conducted it through pipes—that is the
true ecclesiastical function, to put taps to living water.
I went into the bath-house and watched some peasants stand under the
frigid douche, and when my friend had put his clothes on again—without
drying himself—we took each a bottle of the water and put it in our
pockets.
Then away again from Sarof and home over the snow. I carried the
_sukaree_ and the water from the well that I might give them to the old
grandmother at Vladikavkaz when I went south—the actual _sukaree_ with
which Father Seraphim fed the bear! Some weeks later when I went to the
Caucasian city I call my Russian home I took the old lady my gift from
the Father. Next day behold her doling out half-thimblefuls of the water
to her visitors and giving them each a crumb of the comfort of St.
Seraphim to eat.
III
TOLSTOY’S FLIGHT FROM HOME
ASTAPOVO RAILWAY STATION.
From a historical figure to a contemporary figure. From the simplicity
of a mediæval choice such as Seraphim’s to the difficulty of the choice
that confronts a modern.
Nothing in Tolstoy’s life is so interesting to me as the circumstances
of his death, his flight from home to the monastery, his perishing on a
wayside station like some aged pilgrim broken down on the way to
Jerusalem. The story is such a beautiful, pathetic, touching one that
the station of Astapovo may well be an object of pilgrimage for people
who can feel in themselves the poignancies of life, and who are
interested in the destinies of mankind.
Not a place for sightseers, however! A dreary journey at the rate of
eighteen miles an hour and at the end of it all this little station on a
by-line. In the waiting-room are peasants in rags, in sheepskins, in old
blouses, peasants sleeping on forms; bundles on the floor, heaps of
bundles, tied-up sacks, ancient green trunks. On one side of the room is
a grandfather’s clock, on the other is a little wooden chapel with ikons
and votive candles. From the clock to the chapel runs a long
linoleum-covered bar, and on the ikon side of it are scores of fresh
loaves, while on the clock side are vodka and wine. On the top of the
clock burns a paraffin lamp. There is praying and disputing and
tea-drinking, children crying, bundles, boxes, pointsmen with dim
lanterns, a mouldy-looking gendarme, and it is five o’clock in the
morning.
Out of the lingering train they brought Tolstoy into just such a room
and to such a scene. “They brought him through here,” says the heavy
bearded man behind the bar, “and they put him first in the woman’s room
and then took him to a room in the stationmaster’s house.”
The man behind the bar has trained his whiskers to look like those of
Tolstoy, and is vain enough to ask me: “Did you not take me for
Tolstoy’s double? Some are frightened when they see me and think I am
Tolstoy’s ghost. Am I not like him?”
“Did you look as like him _then_? What did Tolstoy’s friends think of
your appearance?”
“They laughed.”
“Did you have many people here?”
“Not many strangers, fifteen of the family, twenty correspondents, a
general from Petrograd, two doctors.... I put them all up and fed them.”
A gruff, astonishing old fellow, this double of Tolstoy. A strange
coincidence that Tolstoy should die at his station. He is heavy,
awkward, unpleasant-looking, like a Guy Fawkes effigy of Tolstoy; and as
you watch him cross the waiting-room it seems as if his hair might fall
off and prove to be a wig, and as if one might pull his beard and
whiskers away.
But he is quite obliging to me, and shows me the marble tablet in the
stationmaster’s wooden wall, and directs me to the room in which
everything stands just as it did then, which is being preserved so _for
all time_—if Time spares Tolstoy’s memory.
The first I ever heard of Tolstoy was the discrediting whisper, “His
wife banks his money; everything is in his wife’s name.” And later on,
when I came to Russia, coupled with national pride in Leo Nikolaevitch
was always the rumour: “When he wants to go to Moscow he travels
first-class; he does not go on foot as he advises others to do. He
counsels us to live simply while he himself lives in style at Yasnaya
Polyana. He disbelieves in doctors, but when the least thing is the
matter with him doctors are in attendance.” I suppose no one really put
these things in the balance against Tolstoy’s sincerity—unless, perhaps,
it was Tolstoy himself.
Tolstoy was evidently heavily oppressed by the worldly life in which he
seemed to share and which he seemed to countenance. It was mirrored in
his soul as the everyday reflection of life, the luxury, feasting,
drinking, trivial conversation, and vulgar pride of his home.
Some time in his life, perhaps several times, Tolstoy must have been on
the point of running away. In order to make his personal life correspond
to his teaching, it would have been necessary to give up his wife and
family and the life they insisted on living. He ought to have gone out
into the wilderness and become a hermit or a pilgrim. So he would have
made his personality and doctrine into one great snow-crowned mountain
and holy landmark in the national life of Russia.
Tolstoy failed to do this, not through weakness, but because he felt he
would lift a heavier cross and would be truer to his own ideal if he
continued to lead his life in “the world,” in the midst of the
frivolities and luxuries which did not pertain to him. He would live his
personal life against the background of this stupidity, his flesh nailed
to that cross.
His life will not stand out in relief till some one writes the evangel
of his life. As yet Tolstoy is merely a great man, the author of _Anna
Karenina_ and _War and Peace_. Few know the real significance of his
life. But certainly it may be said of him, despite calumnies and
appearances, “He had no possessions on earth; he always confessed to
being a stranger and a pilgrim here. He did not believe that machinery
or medicine or law were of any value to the soul of man. And though he
lived in the midst of wealth he lived very simply.”
A very brilliant old man at Yasnaya Polyana. You went away impressed
with his brilliance, and even if you were inclined to scoff you still
acknowledged he was great. But greatness was not much to Tolstoy; it was
surely nothing to him that he remained _great_ to the end. The chief
fact about him was that for many years he was really _old_ and confused
in spirit, troubled. In his heart of hearts he was not sure that he was
living the true life. He felt a doubt that the emptiness and vanity
around him were his own emptiness and vanity. The world was too much
with him; the vision forsook him.
In the blaze up of the candle before death he saw his way and sought
sanctuary from the world, fled....
And he perished on the road, with his back to Yasnaya Polyana and the
“world.” In the room where he died are the poor two-foot-six by
five-foot-six iron bedstead, the table with medicine bottles, a chair,
the enamel basin they washed him in. It is all to remain as it was on
the day that he died. Pleasant symbolism! The world will also remain the
same: it will remove his body to Yasnaya Polyana, and quarrel over the
prayer to be said over the grave; it will quarrel over the rights in his
autograph manuscripts; it will publish the old man’s love-letters; it
will rig up in Moscow a facsimile of Astapovo Station and the room where
he died; it will arrange ten-year jubilees, fifty-year jubilees,
centenaries; build statues ...; but those who seek to know the true
Tolstoy, the real man who had this strange life-journey, will hear the
whisper, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
IV
BACK TO MOSCOW
The Russians are considerably more interested in religion and religious
ideas than other nations. Perhaps that is due to the greater national
growth and greater national changes: questions about destiny rise to the
surface of each man’s mind. The appetite for religious discussion is
robust and eager. You go to a debate which begins at eight in the
evening. Some one reads a lecture which lasts three hours and then there
is a three hours’ general discussion. The room is packed, no windows are
open, but every one is keen. A roar of general conversation ensues at
the ten-minutes interval every hour and a half.
A curious story enacted itself whilst I was in Moscow this spring. A
journalist discovered a group of Hindu philosophers doing a turn at a
smart cabaret restaurant. In the midst of a vulgar music-hall programme
they were performing rather beautifully on their native instruments.
They seemed somewhat out of place; and the journalist, knowing English,
sought them out and entered into conversation with them—as you can at
the cabaret, where performers mix pretty freely with those who have come
to eat and be amused. Two days later the story of the Hindus appeared in
one of the Moscow newspapers. Their leader was the chosen missionary of
Sufism, and was going through all the world preaching a new gospel. He
had had a considerable fashionable success in London and Paris, and at
the latter city a Russian hearing his music—which was in itself an
illustration of Sufism—had said, “Come to Russia; I’ll arrange
everything for you.”
“I’d like to,” said the Hindu; “I have long wished to go there.”
The Russian brought a form of contract and engaged the missionary and
his fellows to play every night for six months in cabaret restaurants
and music-halls in Russia. But the Hindu averred that he thought he was
signing an agreement for a lecturing tour.
Readers of this story in the morning newspapers were much touched, and a
lady whom I know sought out X—— at his hotel, questioned him, and found
that he was indeed a serious religious man, desirous of spreading the
gospel of Sufism in Russia. And she promised to rescue his mission.
In a week or so she had arranged a meeting for him, and X—— came with
his fellow-Hindus and their instruments and gave a lecture and rendered
some music. Several of the most cultured people in Moscow were present.
Mme. Ivanova, the wife of Viacheslaf Ivanof, interpreted for him
sentence by sentence, and afterwards question by question, and answer by
answer. The lecture amounted briefly to this: “First there was the One
and then all was peace, happiness, bliss. Then the One became the many,
and there will never be peace, happiness, bliss again until the many
becomes the One. Therefore we should strive towards the One and get rid
of the sense of the many.”
The lecture lasted about an hour, and the Russians were pleased,
curious, earnest. They took the Hindu seriously, and questioned and
cross-questioned without mercy. The gentle prophet gave the sweetest
replies, delicately evading, politely agreeing, playfully turning
simplicities into paradoxes and back again, and all his terms of speech
were definite and simple. He never took refuge in anything vague or
emotional, treated the infinities and the immensities like little toys
or bits of toys. Everything was clear to him, everything simple; he was
above all things playful. But the Russians sent question after question
and would not take evasion or smile at playfulness, till at last at
half-past eleven the gentle Eastern begged to be excused if he did not
answer any more questions as he was tired. Indeed he seemed worn out.
But the Russians had a feeling of disappointment. For them the evening
was only beginning.
The question of the many and the One, the world or the cell, the many
cares of Martha or the one devotion of Mary, would keep any Russian
audience speculating for an indefinite length of time.
In Moscow in March I met again Mme. Odintseva. A great change had come
over her life. Her husband had been killed, her fortune lost, and she
had changed her religion. When I met her first she was a Theosophist, a
modern Hypatia whose home was a temple, an elegant woman surrounded by
pictures and volumes of poetry, her own especial rooms all scented with
rose de Shiraz. Now all was changed in her life; no pictures, no poets,
no perfume, no elegance, and she had exchanged Theosophy for evangelical
Christianity. The particulars of her husband’s death had evidently been
a terrible shock to her. He had been in the habit of paying blackmail to
a band of revolutionaries or depraved police, and one night he either
failed to bring the money demanded of him, or he quarrelled with his
persecutors, or he got tired of life and committed suicide. He was found
shot dead, in a lonely spot a mile from his home. A note appointing the
rendezvous was found, but the writer was never traced. His wife
necessarily does not tell what she went through in mind and soul, but
the astonishing result was visible in her new life and home in Moscow.
All was in disorder, everything had become coarser, harder. She herself
was much stouter, had given up vegetarianism, dressed very simply, read
only volumes of sermons and the New Testament, referred all questions to
texts in the Gospels, and went to prayer-meetings every other night.
I accompanied her on one occasion. We went to what may be styled the
lowest sort of Evangelical meeting in Moscow. There is no Salvation Army
there. This was something in the nature of a slum shelter meeting. The
preacher was an enthusiastic barber. There were five or six hundred men
and women present at the meeting, and a gendarme stood at the back to
see that nothing objectionable was said.
“We have converted three gendarmes,” said Mme. Odintseva in my ear. We
sat on forms at one side of the room, and could survey the whole meeting
without turning our heads. The men present were straight from toil,
grimy, unkempt, wild-looking. A few years ago the same type of workman
grasped a revolver in his pocket and thought of barricades and
revolutions. Now he has a New Testament and sings hymns in dark rooms,
the tears stealing down his face the while.
As they sat waiting the opening of the service they looked a stolid,
heavy, unemotional crowd, the pale broad-browed women with shawls on
their heads, the heavy, unshaven, clumsy men in ill-fitting clothes
heavy with dirt. But they all changed under the influence of religious
feeling. There was a consciousness of unanimity in this low, vast,
irregular room. Something not to be put down in words communicated
itself from man to man. No one had come there to sleep through the
sermon or, like Yourgis at Chicago, to get out of the cold. There was
attention to the reading of the Scriptures, a communion of melancholy
love and passion in the singing of the simple hymns, testifying and
confessing with sobs and gesticulations in the midst of the prayers,
happy cries of pain and anguish from people whose sole confession was,
“I am unworthy, Lord, an unworthy one; O Lord, have mercy!”
The barber’s sermon was simple and sweet. “Read the Gospel, brothers;
the whole sense of your lives is in the Gospel. If you are in doubt
which way to act turn to the Gospel; do not ask other people, do not try
to remember what other people have done, but be guided directly by the
words of God. And if you have sinned, and if your past life has become
unbearable to you, do not despair, turn to the Testament; it is just one
big forgiveness from beginning to end.”
Mme. Odintseva was anxious that I should like the barber; he was a
favourite of hers. Frequently during his sermon she whispered in my ear,
and called my attention to points she considered good. Yes, the barber
was interesting; he was giving a new criterion to the people, a new
touchstone for good and evil.
After his sermon we concluded with ten minutes’ private prayer and a
last hymn. In England the private prayer would have been silent, and
there would have been that strange surcharged silence which suggests to
the mind that there might be an explosion if one were to light a match.
But in Russia though they had borrowed the idea they had understood its
practice differently. The prayer was not silent.
We all stood up to pray, and as we stood there began a murmuring and a
mumbling and a calling, a general muttering and a crying, a sonorous
clamour, hands waving, faces thrown upward toward heaven, faces drooping
and sobbing, every one saying his own prayer, and every one saying
different. It was a music, a symphony of pain and anguish from an
orchestra of human hearts. I did not pray, but looked about me and saw
the people swaying as if a wind were blowing among them. There seemed to
be no silent lips, and the barber-pastor prayed with the rest,
indistinctly and personally and yet vocally. Far away, beyond the low
roof of the meeting-room, a mysterious and understanding God heard each.
V
THE RELIGION OF SUFFERING
Nietzsche wrote of religion disparagingly as an intoxicant, and yet by
his own religion he was intoxicated. No one ever acted more strangely or
became more excited under the influence of personal religion than
Nietzsche. It is no reproach to religion that it changes reasonable
beings to emotional beings. And yet there is associated with religion a
false emotionalism and sentimentalism that we call morbidity, a desire
to be miserable and to make other people miserable, a wearing of weeds
on festival days, pessimism and “God grant we may all be as well two
months hence,” a living with death and a loving of the gruesome.
Gloominess is a danger for the Slav soul as with us it is for the
Celtic. The bright energy of the Teuton is lacking. It is not worth
while _making_ things or working for _position_. The mind is free and
questioning. There is no sense of—
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws
Makes that and the action fine,
or of
The trivial round, the common task,
Will furnish all we ought to ask.
Nature is “vainly sweet,” and the eye looks out on the recurring pageant
of the seasons with unutterable ennui and sadness. And in life the petty
circumstances, if congenial, are but playfully pleasant, but if
uncongenial, seem surcharged with malice.
The river that runs through life is easily dammed, floods the whole
being of a man, and becomes stagnant, whilst poisonous mists lower over
him. The joyful current ceases.
It is a common disaster in Russia, the falling into a morbid state. A
Russian poet writes:
All earthly perishes, thy mother and thy boyhood.
Thy wife betrays thee, yea, and friends forsake;
But learn, my friend, to taste a different sweetness
Looking to the cold and Arctic seas.
Get in thy ship, set sail for the far Pole,
And live midst walls of ice. Gently forget
How there you loved and struggled;
Forget the passions of the land behind thee;
And to the shudderings of gradual cold
Accustom thy tired soul,
So that of all she left behind her here
She craveth nought whatever,
When thence to thee floods forth the beams of light celestial,
which is a beautiful poem written for those who have become morbid. It
is a beloved poem, and you may come across it written laboriously and
exquisitely on tinted paper. But those who read it and love it will
never “step into the ship, set sail for the far Pole”; it is not an
invitation to join Shackleton, not even figuratively. It is for those
who love and nurse their sorrows. They have not the power nor the wish
to move. They are transfixed by mournful ideas, ideas that sing through
the air as they come, like arrows, and yet console as with music. As
another poet (Brussof) writes:
On a lingering fire you burn and burn away,
O my soul,
On a lingering fire you burn and burn away
With sweet moan.
You stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows,
Without strength to breathe,
You stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows
In shoulder and breast.
Your enemies around you look on with mirth
Bending the bow,
Your enemies around you look on with mirth
Increasing the woe.
So burns the funeral pyre, the arrows stinging gently
In the eventide,
So burns the funeral pyre, the arrows stinging gently
For the last time,
which indicates a favourite mood in Russian poetry. Students say such
poetry over to one another in their rooms of an evening, teachers in
provincial towns say such verses to their women friends, local
journalists talk of them, gentle souls of either sex take down the book
from the shelf and turn to the familiar page and live with the poet’s
pain. Such is the melancholy of the cultured, a morbid yet touching
melancholy. It is refined. The thoughts are scented, and it is
literature and not life which is lending some one expression. But lower
down in society, where there is less reading, life itself gives the
terms of this outlook. So the coffin-maker in Tchekhof’s
story—“Rothschild’s Fiddle”—has a ledger in which he notes down at the
end of each day the _losses_ of the day. All life expresses itself to
him in losses, terrible, terrible losses. Smerdyakof, Dostoieffsky’s
most morbid conception, catches cats and hangs them at midnight with a
ceremony and ritual of his own invention.
The old beggar pilgrim sings with cracked voice as he trudges through
wind and rain:
I will go up on the hi-igh mounta-ain
And look into the mi-ighty de-ep,
A-and see about me a-all the earth
Where I fre-et and ve-ex my soul.
Ah, Eternity, it is but The-e I se-ek,
Little gra-ave, my little gra-a-a-a-ve,
You are my e-everla-asting ho-ome.
Yellow sand my be-ed,
Stones my ne-eigh-bours,
Wo-orms my fri-ends,
The da-amp earth my mo-other,
Mo-other, my mo-other.
Take me to e-e-ternal re-est.
O Lord have me-e-e-e-ercy![8]
Indeed, many such examples might be adduced to show the pre-occupation
of the Russian with the idea of death. The funeral service music is
favourite popular music. In the procession of moods in the soul of the
young man he comes comparatively rapidly to “worms my neighbours.” The
excessive number of suicides in Russia may be explained by the
extraordinary liability of the Russian soul to falling into a morbid
state.
But we are all of us, even the merriest hearts that “go all the way,”
subject to morbid moods, to fits of depression, black hours when we are
ready to deny the world, our ambition in it, our own life, our greatest
happiness, and live wilfully in an atmosphere of grief and pessimism,
loving sorrow for its own sake, lamenting for the sake of lamentation.
We love what Dostoieffsky calls self-laceration. We must every month or
so deliver ourselves up to Giant Despair and be cudgelled.
The darker the night the clearer the stars,
The deeper the sorrow the nearer to God,
says a Russian proverb, but these recurrent moods are not really sorrow,
they are a being morbid. They have nothing in common with the suffering
that comes from destiny itself, nothing of the circumstances of going
into the wilderness, or taking the road with the burden on one’s back,
nothing of the pangs of new birth, of the _podvig_.
Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the midnight hours
Toiling and waiting for the morrow,
He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers.
—Who never ate his bread in real sorrow. Life is of this sort, that if
you will stake all of it for a new life you will get the new life. But
when you really do give up all the old and dear, that is a dark and
terrible hour, the hour of renunciation, of the _podvig_.
And on the road of life itself there is a great gulf between the
vigorous and Teutonic “Welcome each rebuff that turns earth smoothness
rough” and the morbid and Oscar Wildean “living with sorrow,” a great
gulf between Father Seraphim kneeling a thousand days on a rock, and the
sad “intelligent” who reads to himself in the evening hour:
To stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows,
Without strength to breathe,
To stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows
In shoulder and breast.